


Forgive Us Our Trespasses

by cptsdcarlosdevil



Category: Descendants (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, F/F, Fae & Fairies, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 11:48:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6115531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cptsdcarlosdevil/pseuds/cptsdcarlosdevil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Supernatural AU. Mal is one of the Fair Folk; Evie is a vampire; Ben is a hunter who has decided to try to turn them good. He convinces Evie, but Mal is still hesitant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forgive Us Our Trespasses

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the end of the work for content warnings.

“You’re leaving me for him?” Mal asked. Her voice was broken. Weak. She should have cared about that, about showing weakness to a subordinate, about being weak at all. But she didn’t care. 

When Ben had surrendered to Mal, she had laughed. The son of the greatest hunter on Earth-- known to supernaturals only as “Beast”, for he fought like he was an animal, not a human-- had put himself in her custody. She had sworn, of course, not to physically harm him, and the Fair Folk kept their promises; but she was old, and crafty, and subtle, and a princess of the Unseelie Court, and she would take such delight in breaking him.

“There is good in you, I know it,” Ben had said earnestly, his eyes searching her face. “I’m tired of all the killing. I don’t want my legacy to be a bloodbath like my father’s. This is the only way I could see to talk to you, all of you, and show you that there was another way.” 

At the time, it had only made Mal laugh harder. 

It didn’t seem so funny now.

“You know I’m not,” Evie said, her teeth glinting prettily in the light. In another time, Mal would have taken her to bed, and they would not have left for years. But it wasn’t that time, and it looked like it was never going to be that time again. 

“So, what,” Mal said, “you’ve decided to starve yourself because it seems like a good idea? Live on animals and”-- Mal’s voice turned scornful-- “donations?”

The vampire known only as Evil Queen had been forty when she turned vampiric. Vampirism paused the ravages of time, but did not heal them; Evil Queen had spent centuries figuring out a way to reverse aging. The best she’d found was creating Evie, blood of her blood and bone of her bone, a magically crafted younger version of herself, and turning her as soon as she was sixteen. Mal thought that you would prefer not to live with a constant reminder of the goal you’d never be able to reach, but then she never claimed to understand humans, even after they’d become undead. The Fair Folk didn’t have goals, except for having fun. And if by some bizarre mischance Mal acquired a goal, she would be more than powerful enough to reach it. 

“I need you to release Ben for a year and a day,” Evie said. “His testimony is our only chance of the Beast not shooting us on sight.”

“I have granted you tremendous freedom, Evie,” Mal said. She was building up for a truly incredible speech. She was going to have lightning and thunder at all the most dramatic parts, and maybe rose petals falling. Evie would see her displeasure, and correct her behavior immediately. “Not all masters would be so kind.”

“I know,” Evie said. “Which is why I am not bargaining with you. I am simply asking.”

Mal frowned. That line had derailed her whole speech. “Why should I release my slave-- a gift freely offered and freely taken-- so that he can vouch for my lover to my enemies? Permitting my lover to leave my side forever?” She considered. “I suppose you’re not going to eat them. If you were going to eat them, I would be glad to release him.” 

“Because I am begging you, in my weakness,” Evie said, “to give to me from your strength.” She knelt; somehow, it seemed proud. 

Evie had always been pretty when she knelt. It was a reminder of times long past, when she had asked for some frippery, easily obtained. Mal felt an emotion, which was almost certainly rage, about something, which was almost certainly the fact that her possession had decided to get a will of its own and go about thinking it owned itself and could ask for things for reasons other than ‘my master is pleased by being generous.’

How on earth could Evie transform not having an argument at all into an argument? It was astounding. 

Mal said, “what is it about this man that has you so riled up?”

“It’s not about Ben,” Evie said. “It’s about Carlos.”

Carlos. 

The werewolf child of a werewolf mother. His mother was the pack alpha and so could treat her subordinates however she liked. Mal knew this was the way of the world, the strong doing as they pleased with the weak. Had she not herself given her favorites shoes that made them dance till they died? Had she not herself stolen away a poet she fancied and kept him for so long that if he touched earth he would crumple into dust? Had she not fed a man fairy fruit and watched him waste away, refusing to touch lesser food?

Yet she still felt something strange in her gut when she watched Carlos getting slapped in the face because Cruella had run a white glove along the banister and the glove wasn’t clean. It was almost like she was sick (though the Fair Folk never got sick) or like someone had stabbed her in the stomach (though no one would dare to do such a thing). 

She’d assigned a brownie to Carlos’s house. The Fair Folk were whimsical, after all, and sometimes their whimsy came in the form of mercy. 

Carlos had not thanked her, because the Fair Folk did not like to be thanked, but in his eyes had been gratitude. 

“You know if you take Carlos to them, they’ll kill him,” Mal said. “He might as well grab silver. It’d be faster.”

“Ben promised me they wouldn’t,” Evie said, her eyes still staring at the ground in front of her, “and I believe him.” Naivety. But then Evie had always been naive. It had sometimes been a charming quality. Less so, now. 

“Does Carlos really want that?” Mal asked. “To be chained up three nights out of thirty, to never again feel his paws touch the earth, or stalk prey, or run for the simple joy of running.” 

“It’s better than the other options,” Evie said. 

After his first transformation, Carlos had thrown up. “I killed her,” he’d whispered, horrified. “And the worst part is, I wanted to.” Mal didn’t quite understand what his objection was: she’d killed and wanted to quite a lot, and it had always been hilarious. When she’d said that, Carlos had looked at her in utter horror, then puked on her shoes. 

Mal should have killed him for the impertinence, but she didn’t. It was because she’d felt that thing in her gut again. It made her make all sorts of strange decisions. 

After the first time, Carlos had gotten… well, he was never exactly happy about his moonlit adventures, but he’d gotten more comfortable with them. She had only once caught him crying. 

He had said, in a flat voice of resignation, “last night was a child.”

Mal had stayed and rubbed his back until the tears turned to hiccups and the hiccups turned to silence. She hadn’t been sure why at the time. It didn’t seem fun. But then that feeling in her gut made her do a lot of things that weren’t exactly fun. 

“You don’t have to leave with him,” Mal said. 

“He’d never leave by himself,” Evie said. “He’s too afraid Cruella would catch him.”

Cruella was not very observant, but even she would notice Carlos’s disappearance after a few full moons, and she was capable of revenge indiscriminate enough to outweigh her poor perceptive abilities. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Mal said dismissively, “Carlos is under my protection, I won’t interfere with pack discipline but she knows that if she caused him any serious harm the full wrath of the-- oh. I see your point.”

“He’s pretty sure the Beast and I together can outfight his mom,” Evie said. 

“And if I let Ben go, she thinks I approved of this nonsense, so she won’t wreak revenge on Carlos, because then I’ll wreak revenge on her.” Mal sighed. “Were you planning on telling me that bit?”

“I anticipated you would figure it out,” Evie said. 

“So that’s a no,” Mal said. Being one of the Fair Folk makes you sensitive to the precisely worded and the technically true. “Is Jay planning on going with you, if I permit you to put into practice this monumentally stupid idea?” Mal asked. 

Jay, demon of the eighth circle, of pandering and seducing and flattery and sorcery, of simony and hypocrisy and fraud and corruption, of schisms and, most of all, always, of theft. Mal and Jay were as close as friends could be, given their respective natures. Evie and Carlos had both once been human, after all, and that put a certain distance between them and Mal, a certain gap that could not be bridged; Jay and Mal were spirits and always had been. 

It was unlikely… but if Evie was going and Carlos was going…

“Ben is working on it,” Evie said, “but Jay can’t just quit, the way Carlos and I can. He has to go back to Heaven. It’s a whole other thing.”

“Can we go back to Heaven?” Mal said. It hadn’t happened before. Had it?

“Ben thinks that God’s love is all-encompassing,” Evie said, “and he knows more about it than I do.”

Mal frowned skeptically. “But Jay is a demon,” she said. “You know, rebelled against Heaven, all of that.”

“Jay didn’t rebel,” Evie said. “Jay wasn’t even born when the War happened. And how can God condemn someone because of how they were born? He doesn’t for the humans.”

“Well, yes,” Mal said, “they’re humans. Those are the rules. Angels stay in Heaven, demons stay in Hell, the Fair Folk stay in Fairyland, and humans can switch sides until they die.”

“Ben thinks God would have fewer arbitrary rules than the Fair Folk,” Evie said. “Like, way fewer. No arbitrary rules.”

Mal didn’t see why that had to be the case. Arbitrary rules were neat. It gave you something to punish people for when they broke them, and they couldn’t even protest, because they knew it was their fault. “That’s not how I would run the universe,” she said. 

“Yes, well, you’re kind of evil,” Evie said. “God is not evil. He is good. Or so Ben says, anyway.”  
The notion of ‘goodness’ was what the weak used to prevent the powerful from crushing them. God was the most powerful being of all. Why would he care about goodness? It wasn’t like he was afraid anyone would hurt him if he did wrong.

Anyway, this universe did not look like the sort of universe set up by an all-powerful deity that loved everyone. That kind of deity, frankly, would not let Mal get away with the things she did. It looked like the kind of universe set up by a cruel and capricious ruler who delighted in making his puppets dance.

Not that Mal was criticizing, of course. She herself was a cruel and capricious woman who delighted in making her puppets dance. 

“Sometimes angels fall,” Evie said, “why couldn’t a demon rise?”

Evie and Jay were friends, but they weren’t that close; yet Evie’s face was bright, earnest, hopeful. It clicked. Mal said, “You’re not talking about Jay.”

“Come with me,” Evie said. “We can be together.”

“No.”

“It wouldn’t be as hard for you as it would for Jay,” Evie said. “The Fair Folk didn’t rebel the way the demons did, they were neutral, God has to be less upset at you than he is at them.”

Evie had gone entirely off the deep end. The demons had shown respect for God; if you don’t want to serve someone, fighting them works just as well. The Fair Folk had ignored him. The Fair Folk were kind, sometimes, to an opponent who had fought skillfully and cunningly; but the last person who had ignored Mal was still suffocating and never allowed to die. 

“Why would God have left you alive and free,” Evie said, “if he didn’t want you to redeem yourself?”

“So you want me to just say I’m sorry and that’s it, boom, all the times I tortured people are forgiven?” Mal asked. 

“Well, you have to stop torturing people,” Evie said, “but Ben tells me that’s the gist of it, yes.”

“Do I have to actually feel bad about it?” Mal said. 

“I hope not,” Evie said, “because every time I think about the last dozen people I killed, I think ‘delicious.’” 

“See, even you don’t want to--”

“No! No. I want to.” Evie took a moment to adjust her skirt, her eyes downcast. “I think you’re allowed to sort of fake it until you make it on the repentance thing?” Evie’s voice was unsure. “You don’t eat people, and after a long enough time you feel bad about eating people. I think.”

“You think.” Mal’s voice was full of skepticism. 

“The way Ben explains it,” Evie said, “it’s like-- I want Carlos to be okay, so I’m going to stop drinking human blood, even though it is the most wonderful thing in the world. And after a while it’s not just that I want Carlos to be okay, it’s that I want everyone to be okay. And then I don’t want to drink blood because I don’t want to hurt the person I’m killing, either. And nobody can actually care about all beings, except for God, but you can get closer to that if you keep trying.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Mal said, “I work harder at something than I’ve ever worked at anything in my whole entire life, and what’s my reward? I don’t get to do anything fun anymore, and I have to feel bad about the last thousand years of my existence. Great deal. I can’t imagine why the supernaturals aren’t just lining up to take it.”

“There are good things about being good too!” Evie said. 

“Oh, yeah?” Mal said. “Name one.”

Evie’s voice broke. “Me.”

“Even if I did become good, they wouldn’t let us be together, Evie,” Mal said. “Two supernaturals is bad enough. Haven’t you read their holy books? Women lying with women is a sin. The only way we can be lovers is if you stay here, where you belong.” Mal’s voice, near the end, was almost begging. She didn’t like that. Only her supplicants were supposed to beg. 

“It’s not a sin,” Evie said. 

“And whose testimony would they believe about that? Jay’s? The literal demon?”

“They would!” Evie said. “Things are changing out there. We could get married, if we wanted to.”

“And they’ve allowed that for, what, a century? Less?” Mal said. “We are going to live for thousands of years, Evie, think of your future. It’s safe here. You can have everything you want.”

Evie’s brow wrinkled slightly. Mal had known her for centuries, and could catch microexpressions. There was something she wanted that she couldn’t have. Something Mal-- who had given her everything in the world-- couldn’t give her.

“What is it?” Mal asked. “What is it that’s so important that you’d leave”-- me-- “a wonderful life where you have everything you want, including the murder of innocents, and don’t you dare lie to me and say you won’t miss it?”

In spite of everything, Evie smiled. “Ben said I could go to college.”

There was the heart of it. Carlos was the youngest of them and the most human, and he had known the wisdom of the humans, odd things called ‘physics’ and ‘mathematics’ and ‘chemistry’. It was not, of course, as important as the wisdom of the Fair Folk, but nevertheless Evie had been captivated by it. She and Carlos had spent hours with their heads bent together, studying, until she was called away to try a new lipstick. (Carlos was never called away anymore. His mother, failing to notice the brownie, had simply assumed that Carlos had finally overcome his innate idiocy to figure out what his chores were supposed to be and give her some nice peace and quiet.) 

It hurt to think of her going. Mal was as possessive as any of the Fair Folk; she did not like it when her favorites, her possessions, went away. And naturally Mal wished to enslave Evie’s mind so that he could not even think of leaving. But for some reason-- Mal did not comprehend this-- it hurt even more to think of her staying. To think of her spending centuries stealing moments away from her mother, to put together the human knowledge from what books and articles she could find, to know that they split atoms in two and cloned sheep and went to the Moon (the Moon!) and to be unable to do it herself, to help-- 

It gave her that weird stomach feeling again. The one that made her make all those strange choices regarding Carlos. 

“Go, then,” Mal said, and each word felt like knives in her mouth, “with my blessing.”

Evie had been a paramour of one of the Fair Folk for centuries, so she knew not to say ‘thank you’. 

Evie rose from her kneeling position, inclining her head to acknowledge the boon. “You can be forgiven,” Evie said. “If you want to.”

“Don’t push your luck,” Mal said, “you might be good but I’m not. I have a bunch of tortures I’ve been just waiting to try out.”

“You wouldn’t,” Evie said. “You would feel bad and forgive me. The same way that you gave Carlos a brownie, the same way that Jay gave you a break on the teind when you couldn’t collect enough souls, the same--” 

“Enough,” Mal said sharply. Her voice rumbled through the room. “I grow tired of this, my once-beloved. Take my slave, and go, and may I never set eyes on your filthy face again.” 

Evie curtsied and departed. The Fair Folk did not have hearts, which was good, because if Mal had had one, it would have been breaking.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: Carlos is physically and emotionally abused by Cruella, Mal does fae-typical creative violence/torture, off-screen murders.


End file.
